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Weedflower
Weedflower | Cynthia Kadohata
4 posts | 12 read | 7 to read
Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts: before Pearl Harbor and after it. The good part and the bad part. Raised on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Even when the other kids tease her, she always has had her flowers and family to go home to. That all changes after the horrific events of Pearl Harbor. Other Americans start to suspect that all Japanese people are spies for the emperor, even if, like Sumiko, they were born in the United States! As suspicions grow, Sumiko and her family find themselves being shipped to an internment camp in one of the hottest deserts in the United States. The vivid color of her previous life is gone forever, and now dust storms regularly choke the sky and seep into every crack of the military barrack that is her new "home." Sumiko soon discovers that the camp is on an Indian reservation and that the Japanese are as unwanted there as they'd been at home. But then she meets a young Mohave boy who might just become her first real friend...if he can ever stop being angry about the fact that the internment camp is on his tribe's land. With searing insight and clarity, Newbery Medal-winning author Cynthia Kadohata explores an important and painful topic through the eyes of a young girl who yearns to belong. Weedflower is the story of the rewards and challenges of a friendship across the racial divide, as well as the based-on-real-life story of how the meeting of Japanese Americans and Native Americans changed the future of both.
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review
AudieLee
Weedflower | Cynthia Kadohata
Pickpick

Weedflower is such a beautifully written novel following a young Japanese girl and her family facing many struggles caused by the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I enjoy this book so much that I‘ve read it four times and would certainly read it again. Well done, Cynthia Kadohata.

3 likes1 stack add
review
Chelsibno
Weedflower | Cynthia Kadohata
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Pickpick

Focusing on a young Japanese-American girl who is forced to relocate with her family to the Poston internment camp in Arizona during WWII. While there, she develops a friendship with a Mohave boy who lives on the reservation. The book does a great job of illuminating the prejudice and injustices that both cultures faced during this period. While I wasn‘t completely satisfied with the ending, I enjoyed everything up to it.

30 likes1 stack add
review
Brie
Weedflower | Cynthia Kadohata
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Mehso-so

Some narrative and stylistic choices bothered me in this book. The ending also felt a bit contrived and rushed. Sumiko and her family are put into a Japanese internment camp during WWII. She has trouble adjusting to life there until she makes friends with a young Mohave boy. The story does a nice job of addressing racism and issues of identity.

43 likes1 stack add
blurb
BethFishReads
Weedflower | Cynthia Kadohata
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#IWD2016 -- Cynthia Kadohata for writing stupendous middle grade books. Her themes are tough, but she doesn't dumb down her stories for youngsters. Maybe try WEEDFLOWER

6 likes2 stack adds